see a puffin eat a fish

The FE Badge should now support oAuth 10A with the new security patch. The people at Fire Eagle are going to phase out the older oAuth implementation, let me know if you have problems!

Also, we’re super excited about iPhone 3.0 and push, a lot of potential for both fire eagle and the badge. Whee!

I haven’t been keeping up with the Fire Eagle badge ever since I got my iPhone. There’s no ZoneTag for the iPhone and the Fire Eagle iPhone apps that are available just aren’t a compelling use case for my daily interactions. They feel forced. But i’ve been getting a lot of interesting emails from people using the badge and I just checked my access log. There are tons of people using the Badge. Very exciting. Here’s a great user story that reflects exactly why I put the badge together in the first place:

> I just wanted to thank you for the Fire Eagle Badge and let you know that I
> have what I think is a pretty interesting use case. My parents are sailing
> from their normal berth in Annapolis, MD to Florida and then on to the
> Bahamas this winter. I have been maintaining a blog for them with a map
> showing their whereabouts – updated in real time with their GPS coordinates
> via a cellular data connection. When they go offshore they will not have a
> data connection so they purchased a SPOT satellite messenger-
> www.findmespot.com – primarily for safety, but also for tracking. SPOT
> offers a proprietary shared map page, but nothing I could put on their
> blog. They do integrate with Fire Eagle, however, so I linked them to a FE
> account and put your badge on their blog so they can be tracked offshore as
> well.
>
> Anyways, thanks again. I’ll probably be tweaking the layout of the map in
> the coming days. I’ll be sure to let you knmow if I find anything
> interesting while playing.
>
> Sam
>

Thanks Sam!

You can see the blog here.

You know that the Fire Eagle badge can be used to embed your present location anywhere, (i’ll give a prize to anyone who sends me a photo of the badge on a Chumby), but did you know that the Fire Eagle badge can also tell you where you have been?! It’s true!!

Ok, ready? This is yet another undocumented feature. Grab your badge code and find the line that references fireeagle_badge.php. Here’s mine:

[snip]
src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=jqs24bfn1806dxzc&timezone=Eastern+Standard+Time"
[snip]

Next, grab your key, that’s the part after k=. Mine is jqs24bfn1806dxzc. Then, all you have to do is append that key to the URL below, like so:

http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge_feed.php?k=jqs24bfn1806dxzc

That’s it really. This new link you’ve created will give you an RSS feed of the last 100 times your location was requested. The number of times your location is requested will completely depend on the number of times your embedded badge is accessed. The badge only goes out and ask for your location when it is loaded.

You can take this RSS feed and plot out your road trip, everyday travels, whatever. A little cool and a little creepy, just the way I like it.

Enjoy!

When you display your fire eagle badge, the embedded map tries to pick the best zoom level for your location’s bounding box. This depends on how granular your location is (we know you are on 123 Main st vs we know you are in the state of Nevada) but it also tries to show the best zoom level relative to the quality of map data. When this goes horribly wrong you get something like this:

lame++. Well now when I screw up you can pass a zoom level argument to the badge and hard code the zoom level you’d like. Find this line in your badge’s HTML:

src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=5h3z8nmt97qbdj&timezone=Greenwich+Mean+Time"

and change it to this:

src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=5h3z8nmt97qbdj&timezone=Greenwich+Mean+Time&zoom=4"

Mess around until you find a numeric zoom level that works well with your map.

Enjoy!

Turns out I listen to the Fire Eagle Badge users. The badge no longer defaults to Pacific time. You want Solomon Is. Time? You got it! What other US centric limitation am I going to get rid of next? Unicode support?! Now you’re talking crazy. Actually Unicode support is in. If you are having any issues, let me know.

To change your timezone, generate a new badge and use this dropdown:

Enjoy!